LOOK UPON YOUR WORK MOTHER

Multimedia installation: California Institute of the Arts Thesis Show, 2022

Look Upon Your Work Mother unfolds as a score of personal, scientific, and nightmarish figures, suspended in space as if exhumed, forsaken, or laden with potential. Just as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been appropriated by various Western ideologies, the horse serves as a remarkably versatile symbol. It encompasses a range of concepts—from conquest, freedom, and truth to power, beauty, progress, fantasy, and ungrounding. In this multimedia installation, the horse is detached from its traditional association with the dominant white male figure, symbolizing the maternal and a new form of value emerging from destruction. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter and Jean-François Lyotard, this piece critiques the West’s overrepresentation of the human, and the legitimization of violence through purportedly natural or divine order, exploring how these social realities assert themselves in daily life through ostensibly benign images, objects, and anthems.